#does tumblr have an algorithm now?

[tellevangeline]

(Photo of me and my husband by @mettieostrowski on insta)

Caroline Polachek as a Sociological Phenomena and why it’s Important to Gatekeep Twinks.

So there I was (picture unrelated) waiting for the train at 10:30 PM on a Sunday so I can go take some extra estradiol from a generous friend at a gay bar, full incognito, wearing a fucking hoodie, I’m so tired I spent all day working on the flier for my new absurdist drag bingo because I and everyone I know are walking parodies of bushwick transexuals.

Train is taking forever so I have some time to kill, and I decide (d? Should I care about continuity? I am not a writer, I’m an author.)

Anyway I decided to put the recent Caroline Polachek album on, which is big for me because I have been a bit of a Caroline Polachek denier. I listened to Chairlift very casually when I was a teenager but I was far from die hard and since then I’ve kind of just thought of her as an unfortunate but all too common case of a talented musician being so aggressively HAIM-Pilled that it’s practically deafening. I say this as a dyke with love for all dykes❤️

Also the “new queen of artpop” claims coming from the exact type of 5’8 naturally dirty blonde he/they’s I’ve made it my life goal to disagree with at all times are really not helping her case for me.

Because here’s my thing. I’m a Kate Bush ride or die, surprising I know. I have I’ve always been a coward tattooed below my collarbones like the only 1% I’ll ever be a part of is her Spotify listeners.

But here’s the tea, if you’re not ready and willing to hee haw like a fucking donkey on a song that’s probably about some form of domestic abuse you just aren’t the new queen of artpop. I do make the rules and to be honest the only people in pop music right now not named lady fucking gaga who has the panache, the gaul, the unwavering commitment to pull stunts and shenanigans on that level are Ethel Cain and Lingua Ignota, especially since FKA Twigs decided she wanted to live a happy and fulfilling life (and good for her, thank you for all the good times queen)

And Caroline is simply not there, she’s too squeaky clean and widely appealing to go to those absurd and ugly places that make a Bjork.

Now my personal cocomelon/surrogate father figure Anthony Fantano the Internet’s Busiest Music Nerd did love her album, and I usually agree with his takes (mbdtf is mid you just love it because it was baby’s first concept album and you have a deep yearning to return to a time in your life where you first realized music could be art) BUT WHILE I AGREE WITH MANY OF HIS TAKES (sorry) my one glaring exception is that he never takes how cunt something is into consideration while evaluating a piece of music, and by that I do mean that he said gaga peaked at fame monster and 212 is the only good azealia banks song. He doesn’t have the tools to engage with music in a fag like manor, so when we’re dealing with music for gays, I don’t trust him.

And then last night I saw a Drag Queen named The Illustrious Pearl perform welcome to my island as a showgirl vampire wearing rhinestoned knee pads and frankly if Caroline is good enough for her she’s certainly good enough for me.

And I’m gonna be really vulnerable here, I really enjoyed the album. Like, there’s about as much art in it’s pop as cranberry in a gay bar vodka cran but it’s damn good pop and the art adds a nice little aftertaste.

I believe is definetely my favorite, those Rhythm Nation/Mortal Kombat ass synth hits always make me convulse (America Has A Problem is my favorite track off Renaissance) (it took me a whole 2 minutes to spell renaissance right) but I also like welcome to my island a lot and I at least liked everything else except for Billions which sounds like a song that was rejected from The Sensual World because Kate would never release a song that non-violent.

But it was cute. I have a meeting with a literal church upstate that is trying to book me for their pride drag show tomorrow and one of them just texted me “Brainstorming with the Holy Spirit is so exciting and so fruitful ✝️💜✝️) and I believe those synth hits on I Believe will carry me through my challenges tomorrow. Love Down.

Xoxo

-Evangeline

[creantzy]

I don't actively ship anything in An Extremely Goofy Movie but I have to admit I fw Bradley x Tank above all other options

[kanon-kun]

how come some of the people I'm following (whom I know are posting frequently) aren't showing up in the "following" tab on my dashboard??

[halodeer]

ok so the algorithm shows your posts more when you post more often hmmmmmmmmm

[astrxealis]

i do not like tumblr much anymore again :(( anyways important stuff in the tags! but tldr just hmu if you want my discord or twitter, won't be gone from here completely but yeah <3

[numbuh424]

.

[eggshellsareneat]

Alright, I think I like tumblr now.

A pun post crossed my dash, and I reblogged it with an equally bad pun in return. A couple of my followers find it funny, it's a good day for everyone.

That was on July 7th.

Virality on Reddit was entirely algorithmic. You could garner a couple crossposts, but the success of a post was entirely dependent on whether or not it hit r/all--the main page of Reddit. If your post does that, it's immediately exposed to 10x the number of people and immediately gets upvoted.

On my pun post, I get a couple reblogs. And those reblogs get a couple reblogs--nobody really adds any content to the post, it just gets a couple reblogs here and there.

There's a specific chain of reblogs that I'd like to focus on. The most popular post on this chain has about 25 reblogs on it. Half the posts have three reblogs or fewer. Five posts in this chain have just one reblog total.

But the reblog chain keeps going. And going. It breaches containment many times over. And finally, after a chain THIRTY SIX posts long, at 9:30 AM, July 22nd this morning, it hits a popular account.

99% percent of the people who have seen the post--virtually unchanged from how it left my dash--have seen it because it was curated by 36 different people. That's insane to me.

None of those 36 people know that they're part of this chain. They saw a post, reblogged it, and moved on. If any one of these people had not reblogged, the post would have a fraction of the impact it has.

And yet, after two weeks, the post has effectively hit the main page of tumblr. It was picked up, only because people liked it enough to show it to their followers. There were no algorithms necessary.

You really, truly, cannot get this on any other website.

[yelloworangesoda]

i dont really like begging for likes but if a post gets 1 or fucking. 0 notes youve forced my hand

[fivefeetfangirl]

looking through the tags of the is prev a popular bog poll is very interesting cause almost everyone is saying yes, and then 'almost everyone i follow knows you' or smt like that. besties did we forget how this website works?? people literally starts following people because they see their mutuals interact with that blog. so people share a lot of the same mutuals and same circles

[fixyourwritinghabits]

How to Tell If That Post of Advice Is AI Bullshit

Right, I wasn't going to write more on this, but every time I block an obvious AI-driven blog, five more clutter up the tags. So this is my current (April 2024) advice on how to spot AI posts passing themselves off as useful writing advice.

No Personality - Look up a long-running writing blog, you'll notice most people try to make their posts engaging and coming from a personal perspective. We do this because we're writers and, well, we want to convey a sense of ourselves to our readers. A lot of AI posts are straight-forward - no sense of an actual person writing them, no variation in tone or text.

No Examples - No attempts to show how pieces of advice would work in a story, or cite a work where you could see it in action. An AI post might tell you to describe a person by highlighting two or three features, and that's great, but it's hard to figure out how that works without an example.

Short, Unhelpful Definitions - A lot of what I've seen amount to two or three-sentence listicles. 'When you want to write foreshadowing, include a hint of what you want foreshadowed in an earlier chapter.' Cool beans, could've figured that out myself.

SEO/AI Prompt Language Included - I've seen way too many posts start with "this post is about..." or "now we will discuss..." or "in this post we will..." in every single blog. This language is meant to catch a search engine or is ChatGPT reframing the prompt question. It's not a natural way of writing a post for the average tumblr user.

Oddly Clinical Language - Right, I'm calling out that post that tried to give advice on writing gay characters that called us "homosexuals" the entire time. That's a generative machine trying to stay within certain parameters, not an actual person who knows that's not a word you'd use unless you were trying to be insulting or dunking on your own gay ass in the funniest way possible.

Too Perfect - Most generative AI does not make mistakes (this is how many a student gets caught trying to use it to cheat). You can find ways to make it sound more natural and have it make mistakes, but that takes time and effort, and neither of those are really a factor in these posts. They also tend to have really polished graphics and use the same format every time.

Maximized Tags (That Are Pointless) - Anyone who uses more than 10 one-word tags is a cop. Okay, fine, I'm joking, but there's a minimal amount of tags that are actually useful when promoting a post. More tags are not going to get a post noticed by the algorithm, there is no algorithm. Not everyone has to use their tags to make snarky comments, but if your tags look like a spambot, I'm gonna assume you're a spambot.

No Reblogs From The Rest of Writblr - I'm always finding new Writblr folks who have been around for awhile, but every real person I've seen reblogs posts from other people. We've all got other stuff to do, I'm writing this blog to help others and so are they, the whole point of tumblr is to pass along something you think is great.

While you'll probably see some variation in the future - as people get wise to obviously generated text, they'll try to make it look less generated - but overall, there's still going to be tells to when something is fake.

I don't have any real advice for what to do about this (other than block those blogs, which is what I do). Like most AI bullshit, I suspect most of these blogs are just another grift, attempting to build large follower counts to leverage or sell something to in the future. They may progress past these tattletale features, but I'm still going to block them when I see them. I don't see any value in writing advice compiled from the work of better writers who put the effort in when I can just go find those writers myself.

[makingqueerhistory]

Invitation: Making Queer History in 2024

The urgency around learning and uncovering queer history feels more present than ever. Queer stories are being suppressed globally, and much of that includes the queer community's long legacy. It is easier to erase a group of people when they are unaware of their roots. That's why in 2024, we are inviting everyone to make an active choice to learn more about queer history. That can look different for different people, but here are some suggestions:

Read queer books, there is a reason queer books are being banned. They are powerful tools to connect community, use them. Read them, request them from your library, support queer authors in these uncertain times. (The masterlist linked is an affiliate link)

Follow queer accounts on social media, if possible, social media is a regularity in many of our lives, and it's a great way to keep queerness and queer history present in your mind. Our social media are here on Tumblr, Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest.

Sign up for newsletters about queer history, email newsletters are a lot harder to suppress with algorithms. https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/ https://www.makingqueerhistory.com/ https://www.glbthistory.org/newsletter https://arquives.ca/

Look for and record queer history in your local community, there are lots of city-specific queer history projects around the world, and they would love your stories. If you don't have stories, see if you can find some. Queering the Map is a great alternative if there is no queer center in your city.

Learn and share queer history with your friends, talking about queerness in history does more than spread awareness it builds a legacy for often forgotten figures.

Support queer history projects, queer history costs a lot of money to research. With academic paywalls, language differences, and active erasure, this job is not easy. Help queer history projects continue by supporting them financially.

As the year ends, most people start thinking about their goals, and many will be discarded as 2024 goes on, which is why I put a lot of options, both long-term and short-term ones, on this list. Almost all of them are immediately actionable, though. You can do them right now on your phone, and I encourage you to. A lot of people talk about the importance of queer history, but the active choice to preserve and uplift history is much rarer. Don't let queer history slip through the cracks, not when so many people are trying to sweep it out of the narrative entirely.

[wip]

A very very minor thing I have been curious about for a while, and I'm finally asking: why do you calculate queue posting times the way you do? For example, if I set my queue to post 3x a day, naively I would expect it to post every 8 hours. But in reality it posts every 6 hours with a 12 hour gap between days. Why complicate the math like that?

Answer: Hello @circumference-pie!

Buckle up y’all, it’s story time again!

First: nobody who works at Tumblr right now was a part of the work of planning the default queue implementation, which was more than ten years ago. So the full story behind “Why does it work that way?” has unfortunately been lost to the sands of time. All we can do is tell you how it works today and surmise some reasons why. The queue is actually a very clever system and part of how it works explains some of why it works the way it does. Also, there have been attempts to do what you ask—we still have “Queue 2.0” available in your Tumblr Labs settings, which tries to get closer to how you expect things to work.

Anyway! How the queue works today is not actually a queue in the traditional sense. There is no single list of posts that are in “your queue”. Instead, when you “Add to queue” after creating a post, we’re actually scheduling it to post at a future time, as if you had used the “Schedule post” option instead. We’re just calculating that time on your behalf when you use “Add to queue”, based on your settings, and how many other scheduled posts you have already. We use a secondary “index” model, called “ScheduledPost”, to keep track of posts you have scheduled on your blog. We do mark the ones that are a part of “your queue”, but the data model doesn’t keep one list of your “queue” per se.

You can see this in action on your blog, hiding in plain sight. If you add a bunch of posts to your queue, and then schedule a post for a specific future date, you’ll see both in your blog’s “queue” list, side by side. Because technically to us, they’re the same thing: queued posts are really just another kind of scheduled post, relying on the same always-running service to publish scheduled posts across all of Tumblr. Here’s a fun fact: we typically have about ~14.5 million future posts to publish from this list at any given time and are publishing hundreds of these scheduled posts every second.

So when you’re adding a new post to your queue, what we’re doing behind the scenes is starting at the beginning of your “day”, and creating time slots based on your queue settings. If a time slot is already filled, we move on to the next one. That’s why the default queue scheduler works how you describe—we’re trying to fill those “slots” based on the start of the day, rather than trying to divide the calendar day evenly. This just makes it much simpler for us to understand, scale, and predict when our “peaks” will be. At peak times, the publish-scheduled-posts service is publishing tens of thousands of posts in a manner of seconds. We did rewrite that post-publishing part of this architecture a few years ago to improve its efficiency and solve a lot of “lost post” bugs, but we didn’t change how “Add to queue” works.

However, the Queue 2.0 project available in Labs was an attempt to change the queue system to work as you expect—instead of starting at [beginning of day] and creating enough slots to fit [number of slots] every [number of hours], it tries to divide the calendar day into [number of slots] and fit the result back to the original algorithm’s mapping of the day. We never productionized this alternative approach, because it has a few bugs that some blogs hit in extreme cases, and we’ve never had time to fully fix them. It also can cause a bit of weirdness when time zones diverge, like with daylight savings time. Also, a lot of people prefer the default algorithm, and we haven’t thought of a nice way to transition everyone from one to the other. So for now, both options exist, and you can choose which algorithm for queue-slot-generating you want to use. We hope that makes sense! 

While complicated, it is a great example of a system built by engineers to make sense and be scalable and predictable. But sometimes these kinds of systems, while clever, aren’t very intuitive to understand without digging into how they work.

Thanks for your question, and keep ’em coming. 

[timeflow]

good evening reddit users, welcome to the website. not seen one of these that tells you how to make this website bearable so here goes

starting off with dashboard settings you want to turn off endless scrolling (it slows down the website after a while of scrolling), turn off shorten long posts because one of the main things about this website is the total lack of a character limit (as an alternative to this setting, you can press j to skip to the next post on the dashboard if the current one is kind of long). turning on timestamps is convenient because it allows you to check when a post was made (don't get me wrong: this website absolutely LOVES reblogging old posts, but there are times when it's worth checking if a post has very old news in it)

turn off best stuff first right away. one of the main reasons cited for joining tumblr is because "there is no algorithm". this is not entirely true, we have one but we routinely turn off anything algorithmic that staff adds. turning off best stuff first means your dashboard will be reverse chronological no matter what, and turning off based on your likes and stuff in your orbit will get rid of the rest of the algorithmically-recommended content that appears on your dashboard

following tags is nice because you will occasionally see posts with tags you follow sprinkled into your dashboard. this is considered good because it's almost always recent, I personally recommend turning on include followed tag posts and just following a bunch of random tags that you think could be interesting (characters, media, topics, whatever)

this one's a more personal thing but I would absolutely turn off any community labels because tumblr staff has recently been just putting a bunch of random posts under this despite being entirely sfw. if you ACTUALLY want to filter content, then go to filtered tags:

unlike the community labels which are put arbitrarily by staff, tags are put on by the actual users and so you can MUCH more reliably filter out content you don't want to see by putting filtered tags. this also works for any kind of content unlike the community labels, meaning you can just filter out stuff that you don't want to see (a particular character, a particular piece of media, a certain topic, anything you want really)

turn on custom theme immediately. the standard view of tumblr.com/url will give people who are not logged in a forced login wall, meanwhile url.tumblr.com will not. by doing this you also get access to your post archive at url.tumblr.com/archive, which lets you look through your posts more easily (the search function is awful). the main benefit of this, however, is that you get to have a custom look to your blog: going to edit theme brings up a menu that allows you to customize your css, add pages to your tumblr blog, etc. all very useful stuff

it's also worth taking the time to consider whether or not you leave your liked posts and list of blogs you follow public (most people have likes turned off, following is also commonly turned off but I personally don't care about others seeing who I follow)

turn off the let people blaze your posts. blaze basically allows you to pay money to show a post to a random group of people by paying money, suffices to say that allowing others to blaze your posts without your consent will inevitably lead to one of your personal posts getting blazed by some prick and now hundreds of people have seen it

asks are one of the main ways of interacting with blogs so absolutely turn them on. whether you allow anons is your choice, anonymity allows people to say nice things without feeling embarrassed about how everyone knows who said that, but it also allows people to send hateful stuff with no consequence.

submissions are like whatever. I personally leave them on but in my 5 years of having this blog I've been submitted to twice.

to close off this post I'll leave my personal thoughts on reblog etiquette:

reblogging is great. reblog the fuck out of anything. does the post amuse you slightly? reblog it. go wild

that being said please don't put anything in your reblogs unless it's like a really important comment. your comment will be immortalized forever if someone reblogs the post from you and on popular posts I have to constantly go back a couple years to get rid of an annoying comment like "LOL THIS IS SO FUNNY" because that person didn't realize that their addition was wholly unnecessary

if you DO want to add something to say your thoughts on the post in a quiet voice that doesn't get permanently added onto the original, consider talking in the tags of your reblog. this is considered nicer since when the post is reblogged from you your tags are not going to stick around. there is also this process known as "peer review" in which if your tags are sufficiently funny one of your followers (or sometimes a random person browsing the notes of the post) will screenshot/copy and paste your tags into a reblog, which is a much more natural way of having your comment added into the post

tags are also nice to use or organizational purposes. clicking on a post with a certain tag on your blog will show you every post with that tag on your blog allowing you to find posts later, alternatively you can go to url.tumblr.com/archive/tagged/[insert tag here] to a similar effect.

that's all I have to say on this subject. have fun on our glorious website

edit: oh yeah also unfollow staff. it will make you look normal 👍

[lookninjas]

So I usually try to do music from a bunch of different countries on these playlists, but now that the Latvian thing has become an acknowledged running joke, it's time to take it to the next level. Also, while I dunk on the algorithm as much as any tumblr user... it really has taken my love of Citi Zēni and turned into a plethora of awesome artists that I've had an amazing time listening to. So I'm gonna just give Latvia some love here.

The game is simple: Pick a song from one of my bad descriptions. You do not have to recognize the song to pick it. Just go with the description that suits your mood. Feel the vibes. Vote, reblog so other people can vote, and at the end of a week I will make a playlist out of the results, from the song with the least votes to the song with the most votes.

If you are burningly curious about a song and don't want to wait a week, shoot me an ask and I will tell you what the song is. And if you want to hear the playlist (I promise you do), leave a comment asking to be tagged, or ask to be tagged when you reblog, and I will tag you.

Except I'm tagging @not-kaiva now, because you asked for recs that were similar to Bermudu Divstūris on the country poll, and I didn't really get back around to answering, but there will probably be something on this playlist you like, so stay tuned.

Okay, that's it. Please vote, please reblog, and please listen to something new this week. It's fun.

[ms-demeanor]

since twitter has become actively hostile to its users, so they came to tumblr, and reddit has become actively hostile to its users, so they came to tumblr, what do we do now that tumblr is becoming (more) actively hostile to its users? i’ve been here for over a decade so i know tumblr users are the type to cling on despite everything and revel in undoing every change, but i’m so tired of the way this website breaks the way it fundamentally works in order to appeal to new users. the twitterfication of the site seems so much worse than when people jumped ship after the porn ban, and even then, only small communities (and twitter) cropped up as solutions. you might not be the person to ask for a definitive answer, but i figured a tech blog might be interested in considering - what do we do when there’s nowhere left to go?

Okay so, I mean this very seriously: how has tumblr meaningfully become like twitter?

I don't personally find the sidebar view obnoxious and it seems to me like just another layout change that's pretty typical to tumblr. New users are getting signed up with a bit more emphasis on algorithmic feeds, but that is still very easy to change (MUCH easier than on any other social platform) and the algorithm has been there for everyone for quite a while, we just typically don't notice it because a lot of long-term tumblr users don't go into the "for you" feed.

I don't think that tumblr *has* fundamentally broken the way that it works to appeal to new users. My dash now is still very much like my dash in 2019, and still very much like my dash in 2018 (though much less pornographic). Reblogs are still reblogs, likes are still likes. Replies, for all that they seem like they've been around forever, are new and good and I think they work well. I'm irritated that the notes menu doesn't have a "view all" option but I think that's a worthwhile tradeoff for an easy way to see tags.

I *do not* understand why tumblr has broken linking back to previous reblogs but I don't think that's out of an effort to act like twitter; it is a bizarre choice that I dislike and don't understand but I also don't think that it has fundamentally changed the way the site works and i mean you've been around long enough that I'm sure you've had the same experience I have of going into the notes of a post and randomly clicking until you found a version that you wanted to reblog without a bunch of bullshit at the bottom. Tumblr has always kind of sucked, this change DOES suck but it doesn't suck in a way that is particularly novel or insurmountable. (For instance, I think this change sucks MUCH LESS than when they made posts with links invisible to the search, that is something that is genuinely bad that has been long lasting but doesn't get brought up much in lists of the ways that tumblr has gone wrong)

Tumblr *is* changing, but I think it is changing more incrementally and less terribly than other parts of the internet. I also hate the floating clown, the login walls, the dash-only view for blogs (you can't archive it and I HATE that), and - to an extent - the new lightbox on mobile. And I dislike that less than I thought I would but I don't think it's a fundamental change that necessarily impacts my interactions with the site - it *adds* a feature that I don't care for but it doesn't *break* anything that I require to have a good time on tumblr - in that way I think of it very much like Live. People hate Live so much and I find that perplexing because it is so easy to simply ignore it.

But that's not really your question; that's just some stuff I want people to think about because as much as tumblr has changed in the last two years it is nowhere near as fucked up as the recent things that twitter and reddit have pulled.

So, as to your question: where do we go?

Well. Not to be an extremely old person on the internet, but damned if I don't miss email lists. And forums. God I miss forums. Neither of those things has all the bonuses of platforms like twitter or reddit or tumblr or facebook, but they were great ways to hang out with people you liked on the internet.

The internet is changing. I can feel it, you can feel it, I'm pretty sure we're all like cattle in a field lifting our noses and hearing some distant rumbling and becoming slowly aware that it's almost time to run. There's a coming stampede and it isn't here yet but you know it's on its way. You're not imagining that, that's how things feel right now and there are a shitload of things contributing to it.

Things like SESTA/FOSTA and KOSA (which has not passed yet but is a big red flag waving on the horizon) have been eroding away the way that users on various platforms can function. Some platforms have consolidated in ways that harm users; some new platforms have popped up and shaken up the map of the internet; some platforms are being torn apart brick by brick by owners who don't care about the users. It kind of seems like people are actually looking up and realizing that advertising is A) bad and B) doesn't actually work and I think we're running straight toward another advertising-based crash like we saw in 2017. It feels like all the desperate things that tumblr is doing is just rearranging deck chairs on the titanic as the internet as a whole starts to sink into the ocean.

Honestly, I don't think it's that bad. I think it *feels* bad, but I think we're looking at a slow whimpering death of the platforms, not a bang. I think tumblr is going to hang on at least for a few years and I think it's going to end up like livejournal and myspace, which both still exist as websites that are recognizable as updated versions of the sites they were in 2004-2010. The thing that I think would really, honestly hurt tumblr in a fundamental way is if it moved to a more algorithmic and data-sales based model of advertising, and I think that's still pretty distant. I think Automattic is aware that killing the chronological feed would be the one unforgivable sin that would cause a mass exodus and a final crash, and I think when we see that, when we can't just scroll through the feed and see what our friends did that day in order of when they did it, that's when the party is over here.

But that's still not answering your question.

So, where do we go? What do we do? Well, for now, I'd say it's a good time to get contact info for your friends across various platforms. Get email addresses, get phone numbers.

Now is also the time for you to set up a personal website. NeoCities is currently the best place to do this, though it takes a lot more effort than just starting a blog on tumblr. I think that various oldschool blogging sites like Wordpress and Blogger/Blogspot/whatever the hell the google one is are a better place to have your emergency backup than a more platform-y platform if you aren't up to doing something with NeoCities.

If you've got the ability to do so and a group of people who are interested in the same core subject, set up a forum. There's a decent amount of off-the-shelf forum software out there and a text-and-small-images forum isn't prohibitively expensive, but it's never going to be huge and you're never going to have the kind of spread and virality and random connections that you would on a platform with millions or billions of users.

If you can't set up a forum, setting up or joining a discord server for your friends is a decent enough option at the moment, and may be a very good option for people who are looking to keep their interactions more private.

But yeah i think right now is a great time for people to start setting up their own personal websites, to start visiting actual webpages again, to start bookmarking their friends' websites, and to start collecting contact info that isn't tied to platforms.

[fullhalalalchemist]

🚨🚨🚨Congress hiding behind "protecting" LGBTQ+ to push for censorship bills that would harm us

May 8, 2023

The EARN IT Act isn't the only bill Congress is rushing through this session that's secret goal is to censor and surveil Americans, especially queer ones.

KOSA (s.1409), or the Kid's Online Safety Act, is being hailed across the mainstream media and congress as the best bill to "protect children online from algorithmic harm" by essentially, blocking content that gives minors anxiety, depression, eating and substance abuse disorders, online bullying and harassment, sexual exploitation and abuse, suicidal behaviors, and addiction. It's gives the FTC, who are politically appointed by the president, and all 50 state attorney generals enforcement power to do this. As long as they can justify a website 'harmed' a minor by having content that leads to 'anxiety, sexual exploitation, and suicidal behaviors', they will push lawsuit over lawsuit to that site until it censors that content for the minor.

Oh, but that's not it, either. HOW will websites determine who is and isn't a minor? Well don't worry, because the bill says "age verification isn't required". That however does nothing to stop websites from pushing age verification. When they're about to be held liable and sued for millions, when there's an age verification lobby that has pushed these bills successfully in half the states, when websites should know "reasonably" that theres a minor, they are GOING to go for age verification. Multiple experts agree that this would happen.

Last year, nearly 100+ LGBT and human rights orgs sent a letter opposing KOSA. They were ignored and Senator Blumenthal (same guy who is pushing the EARN IT Act) met with different orgs to "update the language". Except nothing in the update language changes any of it's impact. Sure, they removed "grooming" from being a target of this bill and instead are focusing on "mental health". Except, the Missouri Attorneys General, in his emergency order banning gender affirming care, cited a number of medical studies effectively claiming that access to gender affirming care is causing young people to experience mental health issues. They will use ANY excuse to censor content.

This is the tumblr purge 2.0 but for the entire internet. It's just as bad as the EARN IT Act. And it has IMMENSE levels of support. You have the national Eating Disorder Coalition, child advocacy orgs, the freaking American Psychological Association, LIZZO!!!! supporting this. It needs IMMENSE levels of backlash from us, the grassroots, the people.

The best way to fight back is to CALL YOUR SENATORS. It's now going to go to the commerce committee for markup, after it will head to a vote. This is going to be fasttracked and most likely voted on this month or June. It's all hands on deck.

Link to call script to read off alongside numbers to call:

A bunch of petitions you can sign (takes less than 5 min)

Open Letter Against KOSA

Petition 1

Petition 2

Petition 3

Petition 4

Resistbot: Text PHJDYH to 50409

And more information here: Linktree

This is a great TLDR article to read: Vox Article

TLDR; Congress's new bill KOSA that has an immense amount of bipartisan support will lead to internet censorship by giving all state attorney generals, even the ones in Texas and Florida, power to sue websites for "harmful" content and decide what is "dangerous" for minors, force websites to make you upload your govt ID online, and lead to widespread abuse of queer youth. We have to fight back NOW or else we will see an internet-wide purge of any adult and queer content online, globally.